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Cold War Events

Dr. Bodo Hechelhammer, chief historian of the BND, will deliver a lecture on the early years of the German intelligence service, introducing the American and German agents behind Germany’s Cold War spy operation.

Geir Lundestad has been the Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo and Secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee since 1990, retiring at the end of 2014 as director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Geir has made an enormous scholarly contribution to the field of history and supported many scholarly endeavors in the social sciences through the Nobel Institute fellowship and symposia program inaugurated under his leadership. Please join us for a symposium honoring Professor Geir Lundestad at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

After the onset of the Cold War, fierce anticolonialism emanated solely out of the black left, which paid dearly for opposing U.S. imperial policy. Meanwhile African American liberals, such as the NAACP, turned their backs on Asians and Africans determined to be free, colluded with the Truman administration’s support of European empires, and received, in return a few pieces of civil rights tokens. Carol Anderson will speak about her latest book, "Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation, 1941-1960."

For four decades Brent Scowcroft has exerted a quiet, continued, and sometimes great influence over the conduct of US national security policy. Drawing on his new biography, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security, Bartholomew Sparrow discusses how Scowcroft rose to become national security advisor under presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush.

Greece, the EEC and the Cold War, 1974-1979 by Eirini Karamouzi explores the history of the European Economic Community (EEC) in the turbulent decade of the 1970s with a focus on the Community’s response to the fall of the Greek dictatorship and the country’s application for EEC membership.

For the Soviet bloc, the struggle against foreign radio was one of the principal fronts in the Cold War. Poland was at the fore-front of this war, relentlessly conducting, since the early 1950s until the collapse of the Communism, political, propaganda and intelligence operations against Radio Free Europe, regarded as the most dangerous enemy among “centers of foreign ideological subversion.” Poland`s War on Radio Free Europe, 1950-1989 is the first book in English to use the unique documents of Communist foreign intelligence at length.

Join us for a discussion with Bernd Schaefer, Nate Jones, and Benjamin Fischer on the unprecedented significance of newly translated documents detailing Soviet KGB and Easter German Stasi cooperation under Project RYaN, a system for detecting signs of an impending western nuclear first strike.

In the second half of the 1980s, the KGB conducted an international disinformation campaign accusing the U.S. of having artificially constructed the virus that causes AIDS at the Pentagon’s laboratory for biological warfare in Fort Detrick, Maryland. On the basis of his research with scholar Christopher Nehring in the archives of the former communist secret police in Bulgaria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, Douglas Selvage will present new details about the disinformation campaign and the key supporting role played by the KGB’s “fraternal organ,” the East German Ministry of State Security or Stasi.

In contrast to traditional approaches to Sino-Soviet relations that focus on ideological conflict and the role of powerful personalities such as Chairman Mao and Nikita Khrushchev, Austin Jersild draws on the experiences of advisers in China in the 1950s to place the Sino-Soviet alliance and split within the broader history of socialist bloc cooperation and the Cold War competition with the United States.